aweissman.com

Craft

2024-02-05T06:26:00.002-05:00

Four works of art that show attention to craft, from peculiar artists, with particular takes. All recommended if that sounds interesting.

One Good

2024-01-16T19:06:00.000-05:00

I started to get dizzy in January 2023. It began with ringing in my ears after attending a loud concert and gradually worsened. Some days, it was debilitating, almost like being on a spinning ride. Other days, it felt more like being on a constantly rocking boat. They called it vertigo, and when doctors use that term, they take it seriously and subject you to numerous tests to determine the cause. In my case, they were unable to pinpoint a definitive reason, and after about 45 days, the symptoms lessened and eventually disappeared over the next few months. During these investigations, they also discovered high-frequency hearing loss in my auditory range - completely unrelated to the vertigo! - but most likely caused by years of exposure to loud live music.

This reminded me of my friend Keith who was one of my concert-going friends a long time ago. Keith and I backpacked around Asia after we graduated from school. I’d like to think we were a good duo as Keith pushed me towards adventure (“don’t worry it’s safe if we give them our passports to rent these motorcycles”) and I got us to Bangkok and back from Singapore many months later. One time he hiked to the top of Mt Batur on Bali at sunrise while I stayed behind, too sick with food poisoning to join him. When he returned he took a photo of me recovering with one of the few disposable cameras we brought to document our trip. Back then, there were no mobile phones to capture memories in an instant. Even though we talked about our travels often for years afterwards, I never really told Keith how meaningful the whole thing was. We have those few photos, though.

This got me thinking: the area codes linked to our phone numbers once indicated our current location, but now they represent our place of origin.

That change in perspective gave me an idea: in a world of abundance, the real question is not what we can do but rather what we should. What if the aperture of what was available was then, and instead, narrowed down and limited? Imagine a service that offered only one item within your desired category. Then I poked around and noticed that others were also thinking about this same thing.

Fair Warning is an art service that auctions only one piece of art every other week or so.

1001 Albums wants you to listen to all the great albums of all time but only presents one a day to you. Dudel Draw is an app that gives you one new shape every day to draw on. One Thing is a newsletter about one interesting thing, each time.

What if there was a movie service that offered only one film per week, exclusively on Wednesday nights? And once the movie was gone, it was gone for good. The catch? You wouldn't even know what the movie was until two days before it played. Is this interesting or just a gimmick?

The concept of narrowing focus made me think about this thing my friend R and I do. We send cold emails to interesting people we want to meet, obsessing over who we choose and what we write. Most of the time, these emails go unanswered, but I’ve come to realize that's not the point. It's not about getting a response; it’s about the idea of doing the act itself, challenging yourself, and taking a (small) personal risk. Maybe it's more about the idea or memory of doing it than actually doing it.

These emails reminded me of something Sarah Manguso wrote: “The first beautiful songs you hear tend to stay beautiful because better than beauty, which is everywhere, is the memory of first discovering beauty.”

I remembered something else that has beauty: the Jewish custom of saying “may their memory be a blessing” when someone dies. They may no longer be with us, yet their memory remains a gift and a blessing.

All these thoughts made my mind drift to a few weeks ago when I found myself in a tiny basement bar in the West Village late into the night on a random weeknight and a jazz trio was playing mid tempo songs and people were drinking martinis and talking loudly and strangers were dancing and it felt like the center of the universe. Ever get that feeling?

We Made A Movie (or: Welcome To My Torment)

2023-01-08T12:41:00.001-05:00

Right before the holidays we made a film.

We wanted to do something special at USV's year-end event to celebrate a milestone. We asked friends of the firm to record videos marking the event. These would be simply strung together to watch.

When the videos started arriving five days before the event, we realized we were about to sit through something like a wedding video on an oversized TV at a family gathering.

Help: we needed a reset, immediately.

A movie, like a tapestry, wanted to be woven from these raw materials. Yet, we didn't know how to begin the process of filmmaking. Let's go. The five-day sprint that ensued was like a last-ditch effort to catch a moving train.

Step one: cobble together a patchwork of cloud tools to upload and store the videos. Step two: learn, quickly, how to edit. Step two was more daunting. In a moment of something between howling desperation and creative inspiration, we recalled the class of new intelligent creative tools (yes, powered by AI) that provide text-to-edit and other "magic" edit functionality (RunwayML, Descript). We dove in eyes closed head first full hearts.

No tutorials, there wasn’t time. Learn by doing. The tools were the key, the elixir that enabled the blank canvas to look less intimidating; to turn thoughts and ideas into output and expressions, almost instantaneously.

We uploaded. Cut and pasted video. Inserted fade-ins and fade-outs. Added music and audio for format diversity. Spliced in movie clips (Casablanca, History of the World Part I, Swingers) to break up the talking heads. Found a perfect ending song; maybe it wasn't. Yes it was.

From an hour of raw material, we ended up with a five-minute short “film.”

It was grueling, demanding and degrading. Also invigorating. Above all else: all-consuming. Waking up at 3 am to jot down ideas. Executing those ideas at 6 am. Changing your mind at 10 am and removing them. Reverting back to the idea the next day at 6 am. And so on, each day, for those five days. Time evaporated like water on a stovetop. On three separate occasions we declared pencils down. Finished. But, more adding and subtracting. Just one more edit.

Hours before showtime, the moment of truth arrived. Time had run out, the event was starting, and there was no choice but to be done, like the landing of a jet (or the crashing of a jalopy).

On the final day, each time I viewed the film I flipped between loving it . . . and hating it. Extremes: the love was intense; the embarrassment was debilitating, like sharp icicles in my chest. Was this an act of creativity or a foolish mission by an amateur poseur? “Is this good?” we kept asking ourselves.

I reached out to a filmmaker and texted:

“When you finish a project, do you ever look at it and think, ‘this is the worst thing ever created?’ ”

“Welcome to my torment” he replied.

The thing is, it's clear that this wasn't about making a good film. As I look back on it - though I can't bear to watch it again - this was about a blank page. Kerouac once wrote “The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.”

The words - or paint, or sound, or moving images - are only a conduit for meaning, but may never be the meaning itself. The question thus becomes: how fast can you get to the conduit, to fill the blank canvas?

Technology facilitates this. Accelerates too. Reduces the lifetime that exists between thought and expression, the shadow between idea and reality. Even with the torment.

I can’t wait to do this again

What Time Does The Bus Come?

2022-01-17T11:25:00.000-05:00

Did you ever wake up to find

A day that broke up your mind

Destroyed your notion of circular time

When one of our kids was young, we discovered a medical condition that required years of visits to dozens of medical professionals, hundreds of tests, and many more phone calls and emails. My wife Susan took copious handwritten notes of these sessions. It was natural for her, as an English lit major and teacher, to then organize the notes into a narrative. She would sit at the dining room table at night, papers placed on the table like a tic tac toe board, entering them into a word doc. We would then show up at a new medical visit with this “essay” in hand. “Please read this, it will be easier to understand” she would say, handing the printed-out 20-page narrative to a perplexed-looking doctor.

I often wonder if they ever read this essay.

These were, well, dark times. The essay allowed us to make sense of the darkness, the information, to have something more bright and solid to hold onto in the swirl of the vague diagnoses.

The essay also got longer and longer. At one point a friend read it and said “you have a book here.”

Susan spent the better part of the next year evolving the essay into a book - a memoir of a few years’ time, a tale about the intersection and dysfunction of medicine meeting humanity. As memoir the manuscript was written in chronological order - from day 1 of our son’s life through year four.

She printed out this timeline-based memoir on a stressed-out HP inkjet printer that rattled like the subway as it printed, and walked it around Manhattan, dropping it off at agents and publishers alike. Rejection after rejection followed.

* * *

David Epstein, the author of Range, writes about how a simple change in perspective can unlock craft, quality and creativity:

When I worked as a fact-checker earlier in my career, a colleague gave me the excellent advice to go backward through any article I was checking, ticking off each fact as I went. When I only went the usual direction, I found I always just unconsciously glanced over something.

By reviewing the articles backward he noticed more things.

Tony Fadell, the founder of the Nest thermostat, similarly describes that invention as a way of looking at something familiar in a new way:

You see, when you're tackling a problem, sometimes, there are a lot of steps that lead up to that problem. And sometimes, a lot of steps after it. If you can take a step back and look broader, maybe you can change some of those boxes before the problem. Maybe you can combine them. Maybe you can remove them altogether to make that better.

What did they do? Put an algorithm in that would simply watch to understand the temperature you used - when you got up, or when you went away - and program the thermostat automatically.

* * *

I backpacked through Southeast Asia when I finished school. I found myself in a town called Surat Thai after spending a month on the islands off the eastern coast of Thailand. While these islands were a paradise of white sand beaches filled with British and Australian ex-pats, I was ready to go visit Malaysia. My friend Keith and I walked from a hostel one blistering humid morning to a shaded bus station half a mile away, looking to board a $5 bus towards a town called Hat Yai. We couldn't find a posted bus schedule anywhere in the weathered wood bus station. There were a few locals meandering around, including an older gentleman wearing a blue hat and vest, official-looking clothes we presumed. In broken language with our Lonely Planet pages open to our destination, we asked him what time the bus might be coming.

“Yes, the bus south is coming” he kept replying to our questions in his likewise broken English, listening intently each time we repeated ourselves over and over.

We were perspiring as if we were still swimming in the oceans of the beaches we just left, as we pointed to our wrists, some kind of universal signifier for “what time.” He just shook his head. “The bus will come, the bus will come.”

Two days later we finally caught the bus south simply by showing up, sitting down and just waiting for 90 minutes. The man was right - the bus did come, just on a more organic schedule than the rigid one we expected. We got to Hat Yai hours later.

* * *

With some mixture of perseverance and passion, Susan kept sending the manuscript to people even in the face of rejection. Months later, one agent responded excitedly. She offered to attempt to get the book published. She had, though, one requirement: rewrite the story in a non-chronological order. Susan was confused.

“You’ve written the story in a logical forward timeline“ agent said. “You instead need to write it about the feelings you were having. Organize it that way. Each chapter does not have to follow the previous one in time. You experienced all this in forward time. I need you to look at this in a different way - as a set of feelings and associated experiences..”

Huh.

Susan rewrote the story from the point of view of a collection of emotions. It read much, much better. It had flow, more like a novel. Agent pitched the book to publishers for a second go around. The publishers finally jumped; the book got published.

* * *

What if you looked at things backwards? Or out of order? What if you zoomed out and noticed something that was right there that you didn’t at first see.

What could you discover by doing that?

Delusions

2021-10-19T11:46:00.006-04:00

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true?"

Back in college, a few friends were studying in the UK. One night they walked into a pub, saw a bar-band playing and fell in love. They made excited calls back to us in the States; they mailed cassettes of the band playing, the handwritten setlists filled with exclamation marks.

A plan was hatched.

We knew nothing about anything but were avid readers of music books and biographies, of Rolling Stone articles.

We decided we would fly the band over for a week, put them up in dorms throughout the school, introduce them to everyone, and end the week with a big house party on a Saturday night where the band would perform. Fame and fortune would result. The band readily accepted, we offered to pay them in free room and board and contraband.

A few months later the plan became reality and the band was in the US. The week was spectacular, they cruised around campus as wannabe celebrities. As newly-minted managers and promoters, we realized we needed a PA system. We took up a collection and bought one along with high-quality speakers. We hired a crew with a stage and lights to set up and break down. Saturday night - the night of the concert - expectations and nerves were high. The house was packed. We DJ'ed the first few hours before the band took the stage around 9 pm.

They launched into their first song, the sound was great, the crowd was surging.

Halfway through that song someone pulled the fire alarm in the building. Lights went on, alarms blared loud. Firefighters and police showed up. The party was over, the show was over, the evening ended.

And just like that, our illusions - delusions - were finished (and when the hangovers ended sometime the next day, we discovered someone had stolen the PA system and speakers).

* * *

In high school, we knew this kid - D - who dreamed of competing in the Golden Gloves boxing tournament. He trained all year for his opening match. We bought him a robe with his name stitched on the back. We traveled to Queens for D's first match in his march for the title. For that march, he drew an opponent - I still recall his name: Julio "El Gato" Cruz. We sat in the front row screaming our heads off. The bell rang, D and El Gato met in center ring, tapped gloves and the fight began. El Gato swung once, hitting D on the chin with an uppercut. It was as if D's body floated upwards in slow motion, feet first head second, to where his body was perpendicular with the ring for a split second. His body then came slamming down. He was out. Match over. El Gato maybe went on to win the tournament.

* * *

When the fire alarm went off and the party ended, the band was playing the REM song Driver 8. When that Golden Gloves fight ended, we drove back in this kids parents’ car - a decommissioned yellow checker cab repainted grey, fold up back seats intact

* * *

I wrote a business plan back in 1998 for a direct-to-consumer digital book service. Pre-Kindle, pre-iPad. I recently found the plan - “digital delivery of previously unavailable titles, author compensated directly.”

Those words read today like anachronisms.

* * *

Is there a way to evaluate the almost-dreams that became forgotten-memories? Or is there value in them simply having occurred? Maybe they aren't lies. Instead, the "adjacent possible" reminds us that there is a "shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present, a map or guide to all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself."

In other words, maybe the expense of emotional courage in and of itself is enough.

On art and business and context and mirrors

2021-03-07T11:17:00.010-05:00

Jean-Michel Basquiat - Untitled, 1981

Estimated value $300,000-400,000

1/ It used to be that value could be determined by scarcity. The less of something, the harder it was to get, the more it was worth for you to get it. Maybe even the value of a piece of something (art? content?) was more related to the scarcity of its distribution than it was to any measure of value. In equation form, we could think of this traditionally as: Value (V) = Scarcity (S) * Quality (Q). Q of course, being largely subjective, is impossible to measure. But S is not. Maybe S then acted as a multiplier of value.

Yet, one of the superpowers of connected technologies - networks - is that they will remove scarcity if at all possible. Connected networks by definition make things abundant that were once scarce. They broaden access. Without judgment. Removing scarcity is a way to create new types of value.

2/ What is art? One can think of art as anything - images, music, video, gifs, text, memes. Anything really.

Art also is a mirror. That is, it reflects the world back to us so we can see it more clearly. In that way, art is not simply important, it is indispensable. The Velvet Underground’s first record - The Velvet Underground and Nico - lists the artist Andy Warhol as a producer. That record’s cover art is a Warhol print of a banana. The album contains the song I’ll Be Your Mirror:

I'll be your mirror

Reflect what you are, in case you don't know

This suggests a potential first principle: that more art available to more people more often can only be a good thing.

3/ Maybe digital art and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are relevant here. A digital file, when intersected with the ubiquity and scale of the internet, can be “seen” by anyone. NFTs push the notion even further. By adding to the ideas of abundance and scale those of passionate distribution, patronage, the day-one fan and, yes, ownership. Concepts associated with scarcity, now distributed out to the abundant world at large.

Yes, there is no limit on the supply. Yet, connected networks make things that were scarce now abundant.

4/ NFTs and cryptoeconomics (tokens) in general force the ownership issue by allowing for everything to be, and governed by, a market. This is neither good nor bad - it is, though, very different. Worth considering more.

At the same time, I wish Warhol was around to see this. In many ways, he conceived of and predicted it more than 50 years ago. He was explicit that art meant business and business meant art. In an inversion (or provocation) about the notion of artistic creation, he called his studio The Factory. He also said: “You know it’s art when the check clears.” And:

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art

Another artist (Jay-Z) reflected this concept back to us in his 2005 lyric:

I’m not a businessman; I’m a business, man

Artists taking agency over their own economics is not new. Maybe what is new is - again - the scale and abundance, that more people can experiment with this notion of artistic agency.

5/ I love Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. I could look at them all day. Not for the brush strokes - these are silkscreen printed - but for the representation of the world they reflect. A Warhol soup can looks exactly like the actual cans. Thus, they mean something different about art by trying to tell us about commerce and ourselves. Warhol himself decried almost any notion of creativity and agency in his works, via technique:

I find it easier to use a screen. This way, I don’t have to work on my objects at all. One of my assistants or anyone else, for that matter, can reproduce the design as well as I could.

Here is a piece of art and associated NFT - “a PNG file containing 0 bytes of information - the world's smallest NFT” - by the artist shl0ms:

This reminds me of John Cage’s piece 4′33″ - a score that “instructs performers not to play their instruments during the entire duration of the piece.”

Mamet once wrote “a great meal fades in reflection. Everything else gains.” What he meant, I think, was that it’s not the thing that matters, but the thing about the thing. The context of the thing. How you experience the thing. NFTs enhance this by providing for a supercharged way to understand the text and the context (and the money context) all at the same time.

John Palmer wrote an essay minted as an NFT. He called it the “first community-owned essay, crowdfunded on Ethereum.” The writing - Scissor Labels - is wonderful: thoughtful, quirky, idiosyncratic and long; it covers design and music and cultural theory and software and hyperpop. It is a mirror.

6/ I wrote about this 5 years ago in discussing a company called Mediachain, which asked us some questions. How do you show what is behind a digital thing, understand it, pay for it? This still feels new today:

We might be able to find out the identity of the photographer, send her a micropayment, see what social network it originated on, see the press the image received, find more images by her and any number of other things.

Back then, there really weren’t tokens or NFTs. So now, when you have a digital thing, powered by an NFT, more new questions arise: shall I own it, display it, port it, trade it or sell it?

Questions that perhaps force us, again, to look into the mirror.

You'll Figure It Out

2021-01-18T15:59:00.020-05:00

I'm sure we're taller in another dimension

You say we're smaller and not worth the mention

- Frank Ocean

When I worked at AOL, we typically worked from 8am until 9 or 10pm. At the end of every day, we'd congregate in the office of our boss, to sit around and bullshit and catch up on email and talk about deals we were working on and issues in those we were facing.

One evening we were doing this, and the conversation turned to the renewal of a content distribution deal with The New York Times, one of AOL's largest and most important partners. The difficult issue here, as with most of these, was whether AOL could demand exclusivity in exchange for distribution. For example, we knew AOL members loved the Times' crossword puzzles. We wanted them for ourselves, or at least before they went up on the Times' website. The Times wanted to limit exclusivity, or at least get paid. We believed our distribution was so massive that it alone was a fair exchange for some exclusivity. Thus, the deadlock.

I remember this conversation, sitting around the conference-like table in that corner office, 4th floor of a 5-floor building. Winter was outside and the view from the windows of the Dulles, Virginia office reflected the black and cold early evening.

Bob Pittman, the President of AOL, walked around the corner and stood in the doorway. This was relatively early in his tenure at AOL, yet he was known to us already as a media and business legend.

"What's going on?" he asked, smiling. Our boss replied by explaining in detail the exclusivity issue, the various choices and options we had, questions about where we might push and where we might give.

Bob listened. He paused for a moment and replied:

"You'll figure it out. Have a good evening."

He lightly tapped the office door with his open hand twice, as if he was slapping it five. And then walked off.

There was a moment of silence before we got right back into it. We figured it out - or at least we tried. Ultimately, we didn't appreciate the move to the more "open" web would have on the proprietary AOL platform; nor would the Times appreciate the traffic AOL brought and our ability to allow them to experiment on a new generation of Internet users. We met somewhere in the middle, maybe even paid them, and it turned into a relatively good relationship over the years.

The thing is, maybe we got it right. Or maybe we didn't. I assume Bob knew that. I'd also like to believe he didn't really care. Or rather, he cared about the outcome but equally cared about making sure his team - us junior members - thought for ourselves. To empower us. To demonstrate his trust in us by specifically letting us make the decision. And figure it out.

A formative idea for a younger me: give the people who work for you a chance to resolve complex issues on their own.

Mark Randolph, the co-founder and initial CEO of Netflix, writes about this in his book, That Will Never Work. He describes what he came to understand about managing people:

What they really want is freedom and responsibility. They want to be loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

There is no way Bob, or anyone else in that room, remembers that evening. Yet I do, in detail, years later.

And still find myself saying to people "you'll figure it out."

Get No (perceptions of user experience)

2020-12-06T14:01:00.129-05:00

I attended a "progressive" (read: hippie) school on the Upper West Side called Walden. In 2nd or 3rd grade, our teacher Gloria pulled out a record player every morning and let us dance around, I'm sure as a way to help burn off the energy of a large group of seven-year-olds.

She played the same song for us, every day, at the same time. The song's chorus was "Get No" and we would shout and dance around, screaming "Get No!" I remember the dance, the singing, the names of the kids, and the way it set up the rest of the day.

This class picture might have been from that year:

When Google launched, I noticed two things. One was that PageRank (the algorithm used to rank web pages in search results) seemed to work *really* well. The other, more vivid, was the interface:

The simplicity of this for sure, but something maybe more profound. The way this interface was neither a directory (like Yahoo! at the time) nor channels (like AOL) - it was just free form search. Pure search. Insert whatever words you like, we'll help you find it. The idea seemed to be that control would come totally from the user.

The implicit suggestion was: "You don't need to remember where something is, you only need to know how to find it."

The technology mattered here; yet, the interface shift may have been what changed behavior forever.

This reminded me of a meeting I had last year with someone who was interviewing for a product role at The New York Times. His recommendation for the Times was to mimic The Daily (the podcast with episodes based on the reporting of that day) and turn the whole "paper" into audio products. This got me thinking about the interface, or user experience, of The Daily: consistent length, format, and host. From the Times itself:

"Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, hosted by Michael Barbaro and powered by New York Times journalism"

Prior to The Daily, news podcasts existed. Yet, The Daily has consistently been one of the most listened to podcasts, maybe one of the most listened to of all time. Here's a chart of the New York Time stock price from January 2017 (when The Daily launched) to the present:

Again, the content in The Daily matters (of course); perhaps though the results from the interface shift are more profound.

A related topic is email newsletters. Regular information sharing via email is not new. What is happening now that is driving more attention and usage? A shift relating to user experience. Looking at Substack, here are three inbox examples from this morning:

Notice the consistency among font, spacing, layout, heading. This consistency appears new applied to the existing medium (email). Moreso, perhaps the user experience from Substack - the common look and feel - results in implicit cognition among users, something akin to "this is information that will help you learn something new." The innovation then, if you will, comes from the altered user experience.

All this is to suggest only one thing: that new ways to experience something, especially something that already exists, can be the most transformational. The interface can be the message when something old is presented in a new way.

It took me a few years to realize there was no song called "Get No" we were dancing to in Gloria's classroom. Instead, it was a song about angst and shallow obsession with consumerism repurposed for seven-year-olds' movement play.

It was (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction:

Everything about venture capital . . . you can learn from music lyrics

2019-10-27T18:55:00.000-04:00

Here I go, it's my shot, feet fail me not
This might be the only opportunity I got

As I get older, I find that I need to give myself mental tricks to remember ideas or concepts.

A few weeks ago I gave a brief presentation at a USV offsite that uses music lyrics to cover some of the concepts about venture capital that I think about often. My first draft was much longer - 70 or 80 slides. The final one is 36 slides. I have attached it below.

The playlist is:

Drake & Future - Change Locations
Bob Dylan - Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight
Jay-Z - U Don't Know
Bruce Springsteen - Rosalita
Lou Reed - Some Kinda Love
Courtney Barnett - Avant Gardener
Post Malone - Leave
Ween - Roses Are Free
Lil' Wayne - 6 Foot 7 Foot
Jay-Z - D'Evils
Rihanna - Pour It Up
Kanye West - Touch The Sky
Billie Eilish - Bad Guy
Willie Nelson - Blue Eyes Cryin’ In The Rain
Lizzo - Juice
Taylor Swift - You Belong with Me
The Beatles - The End

What Do You Think?

2019-05-05T18:37:00.000-04:00

The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway

-Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

In the mid-90s I worked for a man whose management style we used to call Mentor/Tormentor. He would give us - junior, barely experienced businesspeople - complicated yet wildly interesting transactions to complete (from start to finish) with almost no guidance other than “you’ll figure it out” or “you know my issues.”

Definitely the most stressful professional moments I’ve ever had. Also definitely, the most I ever learned in a work setting. His philosophy appeared to be that he hired smart people and relied on them to figure things out.

Managing a group of people is hard, especially as that group of people gets larger. At betaworks, I remember the feeling when the company got large enough that when the office door opened and I looked up, I could no longer tell if the person walking in worked with us or not. That feeling was one of intense uncertainty.

At the same time, the “contract” between a company and an employee can be thought of very simply. Patty McCord uses this succinct construct in her book Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility: “Help make our company more valuable, and we’ll make you more valuable.”

The most effective way I’ve seen to make employees more valuable at the same time as creating a space for them to do their best work was the one I experienced: by giving people agency over their ideas, decisions, and suggestions. That agency came with fear and repercussions - the fear of screwing up, of making the same mistake repeatedly, of not getting the next great assignment - but it was personal agency nonetheless.

And the most effective technique I’ve used or seen to deliver agency is also a simple one. Ask someone: “What do you think?” “What do you suggest?” “What is your opinion?” Ask it over and over again and listen to what people have to say. Then let them try it out.

We still tell stories about the Mentor/Tormentor, about deals that we screwed up and victories that we won. There were a ton more of the latter than the former. He made us more valuable professionals, and in turn we made the company much more valuable, by letting us experience the feeling of acting independently and making choices. By giving us agency. By asking us “What do you think?”

Ghosts and Ancestors

2019-01-20T11:09:00.001-05:00

People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself
You never really know
-Joni Mitchell

Towards the end of his Broadway show, Bruce Springsteen describes how he’s realized that as parents, we have a choice to make: will we be ghosts or ancestors to our children. As ghosts, we haunt them with our mistakes and burdens; as ancestors, we free them from our flaws and walk alongside (or behind them) and help them find their own way.

In the past few months and without really thinking about it, I’ve started to get my morning coffee set up in place before I go to bed. On the kitchen counter I place the coffee dripper, filter, and scale, and then I weigh the beans. Last night at dinner I realized this was what my mother used to do every evening when we were kids.

Was she now being a ghost to me, or an ancestor with me? Maybe it’s not so easy to tell.

She never said to do it this way, I just watched her. Mornings were busy - she alone had to get two boys off to school. This made it a little easier.

In Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, he makes the provocative point that we are in a period of crisis resulting from the switchover from an “industrial” world to an “information” world. In that industrial world, trusted institutions mediated the flow of information to people and thus created coherent visions of society. In the information era, people have direct access to information themselves and thus have seen that these institutions are fallible (maybe even corrupt). The result - a crisis of authority.

I’ve spent a large portion of my career investing in early-stage companies. Part of that job is to advise and counsel, to assist a company in reaching its potential. I try to ask for feedback on how I am doing in that job. A constant thing I hear is to provide more direct answers to problems posed to me. Typically, I am told, I answer their questions with further questions.

Yet, I think it’s important to tolerate ambiguity. Maybe there isn’t a direct answer. Maybe I don’t know the answer. Maybe I want to assist others in coming up with their own answers. A partner of mine used to say its ok to make a mistake, but not ok to make the same mistake more than once. Where is the balance? Here, of course, the relationship is not remotely the same as parent/child, but I still don’t want to be a ghost, rather an ancestor.

In the end, Springsteen describes what happens when you walk alongside and assist someone in finding their own way: transcendence.

Control

2018-05-20T16:19:00.002-04:00

What is the future that will unfold?

Some like it hot, others like it cold

But we all want to hold the remote control

-Beastie Boys

Sometimes a service provides a value to its customers that may not be readily apparent at first glance. And sometimes that value can be more fundamentally important to those customers that the actual “widget” that is being sold.

Netflix is a good example. Their stated service is simple: “Watch Netflix movies & TV shows online.” But if you listen to the words of the people that run that company, something different emerges.

CEO Reed Hastings has in the past described how viewing works on Netflix:

“Binge-watching is great because it puts you in control. You have complete flexibility.”

These words don’t appear to be an accident. Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos was very specific in February 2018 when he stated that "the core to the consumer proposition of Netflix is consumer control."

Clearly, Netflix provides a service to view content. But it also delivers something much more powerful to people - the ability to determine how and when to spend their time, attention and focus (a form of self-actualization). To compete effectively with Netflix would require that another service competes on the axis of control. Not as easy as delivering content.

Having and giving control is very empowering.

This gets interesting if we view control as a way to evaluate markets or companies. What other services deliver control to their users in this way?

Let’s take healthcare. How transformative would it be to see services that deliver a radical shift in control from the system to the patient? What would this mean? More than online appointment booking or pleasant offices. Instead, directly shifting control over time and space from the provider to the patient.

The value of control, or agency over a person’s own time and space, is hard to measure or quantify in a business model. The Netflix analogy here is instructive. Some have imagined what the Apple or Amazon of healthcare would look like. The Netflix of healthcare would be vastly more interesting. It could catalyze a movement in a market where changes are tightly-restrained by large organizations and professionals. It would provide a value to consumers beyond just their health: control.

Addition by Subtraction

2018-02-11T18:13:00.000-05:00

“Dangerfield eliminated everything from his act

but the setups and punchlines”

Alex Halberstadt’s essay on Rodney Dangerfield is a masterclass on how to improve by reduction. Dangerfield worked for decades as a comedian until he figured out the thing, his insight: “by eliminating every extraneous element, you could isolate what makes it work and just do that.”

Dangerfield reduced his act to just two lines: setup and punchline.

There are other examples. Blumhouse Productions (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge, Get Out) uses only micro-budgets of $3-5 million per film. This limit doesn’t come solely from frugality. Rather, from the idea that

“Anytime you limit somebody, it always - in terms of resources - kind of creates opportunities. Our movies have few visual effects”

Blumhouse films have grossed over $2 billion worldwide.

Steve Martin writes about this in his memoir Born Standing Up. He describes more than a decade of performing with only marginal success before it occurred to him to reduce his act:

“What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation”

In this case, Martin’s constraint was to deny the audience the very thing they expected to be at the core of a comedy routine.

Constraints can apply to fields beyond entertainment. I’ve written before about how USV applies a series of constraints to guide our investing framework. Those include a specific investment thesis, small fund size, single office and collaborative decision-making.

Willie Nelson once remarked that “three chords and the truth — that’s what a country song is.” This legendary graphic from the Sideburns zine gets even more specific:

In working with entrepreneurs I often first ask them to consider what to remove from their service or application. Maybe this also applies more generally. We could then regularly embrace what happens simply by applying constraints to what we do.

Dreams

2017-11-12T15:42:00.001-05:00

If dreams came true, oh wouldn’t that be nice

Most of my sleep dreams are mundane if I can even remember them. The other night I dreamt that I missed a flight to Toronto because I didn’t have my passport.

There are other dreams that are more profound. Those are the dreams of one's life - how it turned out, how you wanted it to turn out. We often evaluate our life based on its relation to those earlier dreams we created. Sometimes that hurts.

But maybe instead of being ends, those dreams are means. Guideposts, data points, simple memories.

Bruce Springsteen’s new show Springsteen On Broadway makes this point. It comes on the heels of his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run. That book - as I read it - was not specifically about dreams. Instead, it begins:

“I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.”

Here we have the artist messing with our mentals - trying to flip every preconceived notion of who we thought he was. Springsteen, though, is too clever for something as simple as that. His autobiography too is a work of art.

Thus, On Broadway backs off from - indeed, alters - his earlier self-classification as a fraud. Instead, in the show, he calls himself a “magician.” What is that magic? A songwriter whose famous songs are about busting out of your hometown, yet now lives 5 miles from where he grew up. A body of work about the hardships of the working life, yet who has never had a real job. No longer is this person a fraud, for his art is magic. An art form in and of itself. One can still be authentic and be a magician.

This matters because he can now be comfortable with those earlier dreams, those represented in the songs. For he is now free of having to actually live them. They don’t represent the ends of his life, just the means. They are just ideas. We don’t need their literal success to find true meaning in life.

One good minute could last me a whole year

On Broadway reminded me of one of my other favorite works of art, Bob Dylan’s book Chronicles: Volume One. The main feeling I took away from that book was the mundanity of Dylan's life. Chronicles can then be read as his personal confession: at one point in time, I wrote some really, really good songs. I am not sure why. Other times I wrote merely good songs. But I am also a father, and I took my kid to little league games, and those were profound moments for me, maybe as much so as any “protest” songs (but I can’t explain how those happened anyway). It is as if Dylan is saying: my little details matter to me as much as my songs might mean to you. You don’t know me because what you'd find is far less interesting than what you'd expect. But, it's interesting to me.

In a new podcast with Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin, Eminem relates his insecurity as a songwriter. He speaks about being younger when his art was a blank canvas. Everything he did was a new component filling up that canvas. But, as he matured, it became harder and harder to find blank spaces. The canvas is full. Insecurity, even ego death, occurs. What does one do? Springsteen refers to something similar in his Broadway show. He tells a story about how he can remember when he felt the most joy in his life: he was 19 and broke, his family had moved to California, his sister had moved out. His only friends were his bandmates. And yet, he was intensely happy. Everything was fresh and ready to be painted.

The trick was to surrender to the flow

My favorite time in NYC is 5am. That semi-quiet moment, motion is occurring but at three-quarters speed, the streets and cars providing most but not all of the light. Volume is there - it always is - but it is hushed. Stores opening. People just getting home. At 5am, all that exists are the details. There is something about this middle ground.

I backpacked around Asia a long time ago with a friend. Over the years the memories became more specific. We remembered less and less about the temples outside Jakarta or the canals of Bangkok. Instead, it was the guy from Canada who was obsessed with Arthurian legend. The bar in Koh Samui that showed VHS episodes of The Young Ones 24 hours a day. Mamet reminds us in Glengarry Glen Ross that ”a great meal fades in reflection; everything else gains.”

So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way

Maybe then it is important to dream and live our life with those dreams. Perhaps, though, we’ve used them the wrong way. They aren’t supposed to come true but are only meant to guide us to a place, a place of different truths. After all, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

The Future and the Process

2017-08-01T10:03:00.001-04:00

"People are often asking me what’s going to happen next in science that’s important, and of course, the whole point is that if it’s important, it’s something we didn’t expect. All the really important things come as a big surprise."

- Freeman Dyson

Uncertainty about the world, desire to control our destinies, maturation - all make us want to understand what’s going to happen in the future. Similarly, one of the jobs of the investor is to buy an asset today that in the future increases in value. Thus, investors - and particularly early stage venture investors - often are asked what they think the future holds: “What’s next? What’s the new new thing?”

I have no idea what the future holds. When asked I supply generic answers.

What if the role of the venture investor is not to predict the future. What if the job is to develop a process to evaluate enormous amounts of data and ideas(quantitative and qualitative), collaborate on making decisions with that data, and then choose a set of investments which represent different possibilities for the future.

In other words, the VC job is not to peer into the future but instead to come up with a process that allows you to construct a large set of different choices about what the future potentially could be. Perhaps, then, venture capital is about the process, not the outcomes. Trust the process.

Process means you think about situations in two ways - those you can control and those you cannot control. We can’t control what happens with the companies we invest in - the outcomes - but we can control how we make the investment decisions - the process.

There are many types of investing processes, what is important is just to have one, create its parameters and trust it. USV’s is comprised of these attributes: thesis driven, small funds, early stage, collaborative decision making, one office in one city, conversational, active investing. Each of these components is an explicit constraint that tightly guides decision making. It may not be the best process, but it is uniquely USV’s.

Out of that process comes a portfolio of investments, associated with a particular fund. Each of our funds, for example, has 20-24 companies. Those companies are what our process has determined to be our view of one potential future.

Relying on a process is hard when faced with rapid change and enormous uncertainty, when you see companies struggling or failing. I’ve made investments in companies that have blown up. I am sure I will continue to do so. Human nature and ego ask us to change course when things don’t appear to be working. The process, however, requires us to keep going.

The Riff

2017-03-14T10:18:00.000-04:00

Today we have have posted The Riff #1 to Soundcloud (and soon to iTunes, Google Play and other places I suppose).

The Riff is a 24 minute, unedited single conversation about one topic with one person who knows something about that topic (ie, a riff). David Tisch and I are the interviewers. We conceived of this idea and after a few months of planning we have started to put these into the wild. A few times over the past few months I have asked myself why we are doing this, have questioned it really, and I’ve come up with some reasons that make sense to me. So, why does the world need anymore stuff to listen to, and why would we be so arrogant (or narcissistic) to think that such stuff should come from us?

Well, the main reason is that we are doing this for ourselves, not anyone else. By that I mean these riffs are hard to do. Hard in that this does not come natural for either of us. The Riff forces us to beg people to join us, to prepare to interview them, and then be engaged enough to try to keep a conversation going on one subject for 24 minutes. I think we’d both rather be quiet listeners rather than upfront talkers. On top of that, we are committed that these Riffs are recorded live and in person - no phone or skype. So, in short, we are doing this because it feels like unnatural effort. Good skills to get better at. Also, as it is unedited and one take, if we screw up it will all be there, we’ll look foolish. Lots of room for failure = good incentive to prepare.

Secondly - focus. I feel inundated with information. The Riff is more information but it is designed to be 24 minutes about one thing and one thing only. #1 is about tv news. Later ones will include a riff of retail, a riff on NYC, a riff on celebrity and a riff on culinary mashups.

Why 24 min? That feels like the most we could ask of someone’s attention in a single setting. It’s the length of a short walk, a subway ride from Carroll Gardens to Union Square, a slow-sipped cup of coffee. These are not unstructured conversations - they are meant to be tight, fast and on topic. Also, as part of the bargain - of asking for someone's time - these things need to sound great, high fidelity. The Riff sounds great due to the mad talents of Ben the Engineer. Even if the content sucks, The Riff will sound great.

Riff #1 is about what the future prospects might be for television news. Laurie Segall, the senior technology correspondent at CNN, joined us.

People

2016-10-21T09:58:00.000-04:00

Much ado is all I see

And feel like it's surrounding me

The crowd intrudes all day

'Til I'm finally swept away

A few weeks ago I had the extreme privilege of going to a meeting in Washington, D.C. at a building called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This the building that houses the offices of the executive branch of the United States government. It is a great old building the majesty of which you feel as you enter it via the multiple layers of security.

Then inside, there are . . . offices. Some of them reflect the architecture of a building built in 1917, but they are otherwise for the most part nondescript and surely less opulent or fancy or technology-laden than the average mid-sized venture capital firm. There are simply rooms designed for groups of people to meet with each other.

Which took me aback at first until I thought to myself that, at its core, the business of government is just groups of people attempting to make decisions - negotiating, cajoling, arguing, attempting to build consensus. It’s just people.

As a venture investor, one obviously gets the opportunity to back entrepreneurs - people - and different firms place different levels of emphasis on people, ideas, stage, and other things. Regardless, the people part is one of the best aspects of the job.

Which brings me to the blockchain. Our firm has what is now a well documented, ongoing and evolving thesis and related ideas about why we believe the blockchain is one of the most exciting technology shifts (movements?) we’ve seen in a long time. But there is also another aspect of it that is as exciting as the transformational nature or potential of outsized investment gains that may result therefrom.

It’s the people.

The blockchain and its evolving ecosystem and community (Joel and I called it “True Believers” the other day) are a wonderfully smart, intense, focused, weird, open, fun group of people. Almost across the board. Some are capitalists, some may not be capitalists, some cannot figure out which way to go, but all are curious. They are interested in finance, medicine, protocols, storage, music. But virtually every single person I’ve met is as open to conversation and debate, is transparent about their ideas and biases, as anyone I have professional come across. And, every single one of them smiles and laughs, simultaneously taking this blockchain stuff really seriously, and not seriously enough.

I’ve seen this before - when I worked at AOL in 1996 and in the early days of the social web 2006 or so.

Clearly, smiling, engaged entrepreneurs do not an investment thesis make.

Yet, almost weekly I’m coming across articles online making valid points about the unknown and dislocating changes that will be wrought when computers continue their march towards replacing tasks that people do. These concerns feel real.

But at the same time I also can't help but allow myself to get swept away in the enthusiasm of these people I am meeting - the humans - building blockchain software. That their enthusiasm, openness and sense of humor will in fact show us the way towards finding am amazing middle where technology and humanity do in fact meet.

The Reordering of Medicine

2016-06-14T12:27:00.001-04:00

When you wake up in the morning

You'll have a brand new feeling

And you'll find yourself healing

-Daniel Johnston

The nature of the way we interact - or desire to interact - with medicine and our medical care is starting to change fundamentally. This is less about the unbundling of medicine (which may also be happening) but instead the reordering of it. Stemming from a combination of user desires (driven by the mobile transformation of the last 10 years) and software and device capabilities, the reordering can be seen acutely in some conflicts that are now occurring.

Take just one example: UnitedHealthcare recently decided to make equipment by Medtronic its preferred in-network device for insulin pumps. This is a Medtronic device.

The diabetic community was incensed by this decision. Why? Because alternative device manufacturers had been delivering insulin pumps with different features that users wanted. Like touch screen devices from Tandem or color screens from Animas or Omnipod:

Of course, people took to social media to express their feelings: #mypumpmychoice and #accessmatters are just two of the relevant hashtags here.

Underlying this all is the simple idea that “technology is intensely personal.” No longer does technology being personal solely apply to our creative modes of self expression (our cameras, pictures, videos, tweets and Snaps) - it now also applies to how we manage our lives and health. Our phones may not be becoming our new doctors (though I think they can), but they are shifting the ways we interact with and track our health care.

This has the potential to put people at the center of the medical universe (in the same way people have become one center of the media universe).

This isn’t unbundling but more like reordering. Unbundling refers to the phenomenon whereby a market or industry that is tightly coupled, or otherwise concentrated or vertically integrated, is then later transformed when it splits into component parts. The components of healthcare are already fragmented, however. Instead, what is happening may be that the components of medical care are being reordered into something new - patient demanded and patient centric. Defined by the user and user needs.

This isn’t totally new. Jay Parkinson, MD, has been writing about this for years, my favorite quote of his:

People are the CEO of their health, and doctors are just consultants.

What may be new is the technology and services have finally caught up to make this a reality.

And it’s not just insulin pumps, but also many other services. For example, apps to track fertility (like Clue) only indirectly implicate a physician, but for sure help a person collect vital signals about their bodies and health. Parkinson’s very own Sherpaa tackles the problem of the complexity of employer managed healthcare by viewing it as a user experience problem to be solved. Smartphone accessories can now perform tests to detect HIV and syphilis from a finger prick of blood and in just 15 minutes. AliveCor allows you to perform an electrocardiogram at home. Services like Lemonaid and Nurx dramatically simplify the diagnosis experience (and cost) by providing computer-assisted mobile-only medical care directly to users.

This user-centric approach to medicine is also occurring in more b2b oriented services too. Eligible has created an API that enables a healthcare service developer to focus on user experience and not payment and insurance infrastructure (in a similar manner to, for example, Stripe). Lumity uses employee data to help companies provide the best benefits.

USV has, natch, invested in a bunch of these companies, some listed above.

The thing that ties all these together is putting the user - the consumer of the healthcare - at the center of the universe and building out from there. There are, of course, other vital players in this medical matrix - but this reordering may be the beginning of a user-centric approach that has been largely absent so far at scale. One that feels consistent with trends we have seen in other markets and also one that could result in real change in the economy and society.

Bots, Messaging and SmarterChild

2016-04-17T21:07:00.002-04:00

If I gave you my love, I tell you what I'd do

I'd expect a whole lot of love out of you

- Al Green

Smart people believe that messenger type interfaces and associated “bots” will become a primary way people access new services going forward. We at USV certainly find truth in that, see both Kik and Koko and Libov’s thoughts here.

There are a bunch of reasons why this could be the case. First, the primacy of messaging - in all its various forms - appears to be growing as fast as ever. The conversational nature of messaging and chat also feels natural. Finally, the reduced load on a user from having to switch contexts to do different things appears as a major benefit to the different interface.

I’ve seen this before, as one of my first investments ever in 2000 was leading the first financing in SmarterChild, where that product and company faced many of these same questions. What did they see and do?

Given that it was 2000-2001, SmarterChild launched on the then dominant (only?) messaging platform - AOL’s instant messenger (AIM). In no way did we think this was a wholly original idea - it was inspired by Eliza, Alice, and many others. Instead, the implementation and technology were more unique.

SmarterChild was not designed to live as simply one of many names on your contact list delivering services. The goal was for it to be your primary portal into the world - to be the one “bot” that ruled them all.

As a result, the company spent an inordinate amount of time upfront building personality libraries. The idea was that since SmarterChild was interjected into a place that was exclusively where personal conversations occurred with friends, the service (or bot) had to act like your friend in addition to being a utility service. Otherwise it would too interruptive or, worse, easy to ignore.

This required SmarterChild to be able to respond to not only informational queries but also, well, sex and profanity. Chris Bray, one of the original developers, was once asked how people were using SmarterChild. He replied:

The implicit assumption here was that the utility services would take time to perfect, so you had to give people a reason to stick around while that happened. A domain library that responded to profanity was thus a necessity, along with weather, sports scores, stock quotes, news, dictionary, yellow pages and search.

Making SmarterChild appear as a friend (albeit a strange one) would become the primary way people would then tell their other friends about it. And alot of people told their friends. At the peak, SmarterChild had tens and tens of millions of followers on the IM platforms. I am pretty sure this was - at the time at least - the most followed “user” in the history of AIM. People posted thousands of screenshots of their interactions with and feelings about SmarterChild:

The other area that the company invested heavily into was response time. A first principle was that unless the bot could answer in under 10 milliseconds to each and every request it would be a failure. Speed, speed, speed.

SmarterChild worked well until it didn’t work well. For one, at some early point it needed explicit agreements with the platform owners because it quickly ran into rate limits. The volumes were also so massive it needed technical cooperation with them. And, finally, there was the constant tug back and forth with the platforms.

ActiveBuddy, the parent corporation of SmarterChild, lived virtually every day with both the excitement of massively increasing user numbers and fear that they would be shut down because they neither owned nor had any control over their distribution. Ultimately, that tension was too much to manage against.

Somewhere In The Middle

2015-12-30T10:58:00.001-05:00

Change, nothing stays the same

- Van Halen

2015 was in some ways the year that the science of gene editing - or Crispr - came into the public consciousness. As part of that, large incumbent players made big moves. For example, this joint venture involving Bayer (a $40B company).

There were other examples of the “incumbents” in the health and medicine space making significant investments into innovation in 2015: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center built a $300 million, state-of-the-art outpatient surgery center that uses beacon based tracking of patients, HD based anatomical imaging, and an Xbox for fitness activities.

Yet, at the same time things are happening at the same or a faster pace at the edge - in a “bottoms up” manner - businesses and products that could potentially be major transformations. Amino is a desktop bioengineering system that will cost less than $700. There is also the frugal science movement, "the endeavor to create low-cost, easy-to-use tools that address serious problems."

This dynamic - with incumbents making what appear to be aggressive, risky and expensive moves and at the same time new entrants chipping away at the margins and edges - is also being replicated in other industries.

Take the beer business. On the one hand, the number of craft breweries in the U.S. surpassed the historic high set in 1873, topping 4,100 (see: America Has More Breweries Than Ever Before).

Then look at the M&A activity from incumbents in 2015 alone (from “Why 2015 Was Such a Historic Year for Craft Beer”):

Business moving from the top down, and from the bottom up, simultaneously.

In the technology world things look the same. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent and Amazon, to name just a few, are moving on many, many fronts. “There’s one theme this year that seems to run horizontally across many of the top tech companies we cover: everyone wants to do everything” (Lauren Goode in the Verge).

Or, as Jeff Bezos, CEO of the “retailer” Amazon.com said just the other day: “We want to win an Oscar. Amazon has already won Golden Globes and Emmys. Our current target is to produce 16 home movies a year.”

But not only are the big firms expanding - dozens of new companies are being started yearly. In 2015 over $4B was invested in digital health startups alone by over 300 venture firms. Similarly, about $4 billion has been invested in VR in the past few years.

And while Silicon Valley is the gravitational center of technology industry, Stockholm is “the second largest producer of billion dollar start-ups after Silicon Valley on a per capita basis.”

What is going on here, is this anything new? Who knows, for sure, but I do think there is a potentially new dynamic playing out. That is, the terms “innovation” and “disruption” (as vague as they may be) have become mainstream, and are no longer the secret, province, or modus operandi of a smaller subset of businesses. As Jonathan wrote in an email to us the other week - the leaders of this era have been trained in the art of disruption.

This is a sign of market maturity but it also feels like something more - because while the players at the top move aggressively, the ones at the bottom do not appear to be slowing. To the contrary, they too are aggressively trying new models and businesses. It’s like full stack innovation being played out on a global scale. :-)

The next few years are going to be interesting.

No Stack Startups

2015-05-06T06:32:00.001-04:00

“Who can unlearn all the facts that I've learned”

One way of looking at a publisher’s chain of business operations is that there are five core things it must do: (1) produce content; (2) market/promote content; (3) distribution; (4) figure out the best user interface or experience for its content; (5) and monetize the business. This applies, really, to any publisher: both content and commerce, for example. So, to maximize end user experience and value, and from there enterprise value, a company needs to maximize its ability to deliver across those components. Of course, technology infuses them all.

One way to accomplish this was suggested by Chris Dixon last year. He called it the “full stack startup”:

"The new approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses existing companies. . . you need to get good at many different things: software, hardware, design, consumer marketing, supply chain management, sales, partnerships, regulation, etc.”

“You need to get good at many different things” being the key proposition.

But maybe, a year or so later, we are seeing something different emerging. Something closer to the actual unbundling of content and commerce businesses themselves from the web at large (and the apps thereto). The unbundling of the full stack startup. Where instead of being good at many things, companies can just focus on the last mile of value they provide, the one thing they can excel at better than anyone else. Maybe this should be called the No Stack Startup - services that can focus on doing only one thing - hopefully well - and utilize other services for everything else.

This is not totally new but is challenging some of established orthodoxy by assuming there are some things - design for example - that may not be core competencies.

Some examples made me think of this:

The Shade Room - an Instagram based entertainment publisher, that only does the content sourcing and production

Stefan’s Head - a text based commerce company, that only designs the products and uses Twilio (I think) on the front end and Stripe on the back end, to deliver via SMS its offers

Weiguofang - a fruit seller that operates on WeChat

TextRex - restaurant recommendations over SMS

Some characteristics all these share is that they use other platforms and APIs (or protocols, in the case of SMS) to cobble together a service and in doing so rely almost wholly on those platforms and APIs for every function of the business other than the one they can be the best at. And, maybe more importantly, they all are using those other platforms to define their users experiences.

Take Facebook, for example. At some level, the Facebook is a very good platform to market, distribute, promote, and - now, maybe - monetize content on. The UX is well known to its users - and optimized over years through billions of interactions for commenting and sharing. In this way, Facebook performs 4 of the 5 components listed above. All, except making the content itself. Similarly, take other platforms, such as Instagram:

“If you have an Instagram account, you can slap a price tag on anything, take a picture of it, and sell it. For instance, you could take this can of San Pellegrino, paint it pink, put a heart on it, call it yours, and declare it for sale. Even my grandmother has an Instagram business! She sells dried fruit. A friend’s cousin is selling weird potted plants that use Astroturf. People are creating, you know, hacked products.”

These No Stack businesses may not offer a “great experience” (traditionally defined) but they likely are “good enough” (see this presentation for a great overview of how this is happening in Asia).

Of course, most of these are not even "mobile-first" businesses - they are "mobile-only". They often don’t even have web sites (or, apps for that matter): "the homepage once conferred some sense of reaching your canonical destination, it’s now your name on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon etc. that consumers are searching for” (Jonathan Libov).

Historically there have always been services and APIs to string together capabilities. Until recently, most of these have been back-end infrastructure types.

Now it feels like there is something additional going on. For one, the back end services have gotten really, really good and really varied (see, Stripe, Twilio, Shippo, Kabbage, Ziggeo, Layer as just a few examples covering payments, messaging, shipping, financing and video).

But moreso, the No Stack services are utilizing other front ends layered on top of the back end services. They are utilizing front ends that may not have even been initially designed for those purposes. But they work because in many ways they are optimal user experiences that are already market tested.

The No Stack Startup thus does not attempt to recreate a user experience, instead relying on other UX that are good enough, and getting better. This obviously inverts the notion of user experience and even design (my partner Albert's great TEDx talk is all about inversions in fact).

Even better, in relying on the UX of other platforms, the No Stack Startup also relies on the users of those platforms. In some ways, and to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, this new class of services looks at other platforms, builds upon them, and thinks: "your users are my opportunity."

I have been trying to figure out what the implications of this might be. A few ideas:

* the platforms themselves may have different and even stronger network effects than previously imagined (though in different ways), as springboards to other services

* it feels like it is an amazing time to be a creative entrepreneur utilizing emerging no stack techniques, though it is wholly unclear how to measure the sustainability of the no stack approach via the full stack approach

* the environment for incumbent publishers is even more competitive with a faster feedback loop then we probably realize.

Regardless of the implications, it seems that when there is continuously less "there" needed to create value, we might at a minimum require some new definitions.

Changing Metaphors

2015-04-10T06:15:00.000-04:00

"Photograph - all I've got is a photograph. But it's not enough"

Def Leppard

Wikipedia tells us that the word "photograph" derives from the Greek words phos and graphê, together meaning "drawing with light."

I suppose that for a hundred or so years that general definition worked as a metaphor to describe a new technology and medium and what could be done with it, whether that be still, animated or in motion images.

But sometimes metaphors stop working as a way to mentally conceive, and build off of and from, new technologies.

When the "web" first came into mass consciousness and culture, the metaphor that was initially used was the web "page". By using the word "page" as the defining principle, we then logically used other pages that we knew - magazine pages, in particular - to define what web pages were and could be. Interactive magazines, in a way. So, perhaps, the initial wave of web innovation was about making better magazines - interactive, specifically targeted pages for sure, but pages and the attributes of pages nonetheless. Design - user interface and experience - then also followed this line of thought. Thus, it's no surprise that the first search engines used directories - indexes, of a sort - as their jumping off point metaphor for organization.

It took a while to bust out of the "page" metaphor for web services experiences, maybe 10 years or more. And one could argue that the page metaphor itself was limiting, and then the results therefrom were also limited. Ultimately, the stream and other ideas became dominant, and what was (and still is) exciting about those is that they feel more native to the Internet (and mobile). There is no strong analogy for an analog stream experience.

I think we are in the same place right now with "drawing with light." While functionally that definition may still be correct, what words do we use to make sense of a "drawing with light" that later disappears (Snapchat)? Or that moves and is remixed (animated gifs)? These things are no longer designed per se to capture and be archival. They are meant to enhance current experience.

Or, how do we think about new forms of medical imaging, like figure 1, which take an image (or an ekg, or xray) that is about a local, health experience, and broadcast it all over the world for advice, consensus and, yes, ego? Or Epibone, which uses 3D images to grow bones. What about Mapillary - crowdsourcing street level photos of every place in the world. What do we even call a map once we have that? Similarly, Hivemapper, which is a network of social flying cameras. Finally, the idea of "drawing with light" hardly captures something like Cornar which attempts to record what is beyond the line of sight.

And, once images are digital, and copying them becomes trivial, how do we think about ownership, attribution, and things like that?

Luckily, smart people are thinking about this. Evan Nisselson's LDV Vision Summit (http://www.ldv.co/visionsummit/) on May 19 & 20 in NYC, for one, is two days exploring specifically and only this. New metaphors - computer vision, artificial intelligence, deep learning - that may help. It should be really interesting, and Evan and I will be talking about these themes at the event.

What's great is that we are busting out of the limited, existing "incumbent" metaphor, and inventing new things based on what may now be possible. We'll just need some new words to describe them.

The Chaos Theory Of Startups

2015-02-13T09:22:00.000-05:00

"Since we don't know where we're going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there" - Ken Kesey

I was flying from NY to SF the other day and at one point the gentleman I was sitting next to asked me if I was flying towards or away from home. I told him NYC was my home and I was on a business trip. He then said, "let me guess, Internet business." I was momentarily self conscious (was it my shoes? laptop stickers?) but then figured it was a nice bit of self-reflective cultural commentary: everyone flying to SF is going there for the Internet.

We chatted about it and he asked me something I've been asked many times over the years - "how do these Internet companies make money." Which was nice because we discussed all the "Internet companies" that actually do make money because they are, in fact, good businesses. Points scored.

But then we got talking about what startups are, or aren't, and what that word actually means, or doesn’t mean. At that point I got more tongue-tied then earlier in the conversation. I couldn't totally describe the meaning of the word.

I still can't. But I thought more about it overnight and then had a notion this morning that maybe startups are actually about chaos. Not necessarily chaos meaning "a state of confusion," but instead chaos meaning systems that are explicitly designed to be dynamical and highly sensitive to initial conditions. Indeed, chaos theory provides an almost-perfect description here of the outcomes of startups:

"Small differences in initial conditions yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general."

The process of starting something up, then, doesn't view that chaos as a bug, but as a reality. Even as a competitive advantage, if you will, because if the conditions are actually right, the outcome and its impact will be oversized (indeed, massively oversized).

In chaos systems, one of the challenges then is to determine what is random, or chaotic, and what is meaningful. One of the hard things about being in a startup in this state of chaos is to actually figure out what course of action leads to randomness or instead leads to signal to build upon and grow into and out from. In short, the difficulty is how to decide what to do.

If one believes this, it probably follows then that the decision making process itself that goes into startups is primary: it's less about the actual decisions themselves then it is about the process used to make those decisions. In any given scenario there are three potential outcomes. The best outcome is that you make the correct decision. The second best is that you make the wrong decision. The worst outcome is when you can't make a decision.

So then, “process” becomes a defining characteristic. Your framework for making decisions matters as much or more than the decisions themselves, because the "chaos" of the system makes most outcomes indeterminate (again, chaos theory: “long-term prediction [is] impossible in general”).

So you need a framework, a set of first principles. That then guide your decision making and problem solving.

Taken a step further, I've always thought the most useful thing a venture investor can then do for a company is simply help them come up with that framework, that scaffolding, to throw all those choices into. And not specifically to help make the choices themselves. After all, one of the primary ways venture investors can add value is through having seen dozens and dozens of these chaoses. Presumably, we are well-suited to help determine frameworks for decision making in future, similar chaotic scenarios.

I think there are lots of different frameworks or first principles for decision making; it’s not a limited set. This may mean that figuring out the framework may be the hardest question of all. Determining what successful startups are outliers or are patterns may be less relevant, as we only need to look for the frameworks they use and then copy or fork them for our situation.

Phil Jackson believed this too. He wrote "the road to freedom is a beautiful system." The winningest coach in NBA history believed that his success was developing a framework for his players to guide the dozens and dozens of decisions that they have to make each game, each play. He actually believed then, that his job as a coach during games was just to watch. If he had helped the team develop the right framework, then his role would at its optimum - at decision-making time – simply to sit back and let them process.

This doesn't always lead to the right decisions, but has reminded me that maybe our role as venture investors is precisely the same.

Looking More Closely

2014-11-20T10:42:00.001-05:00

I was talking when I should have been listening

- Grant Hart

As venture investors, we look at our investments and investment strategy continuously at a macro level. Questions like: how much are we investing and how fast? How does that compare to our other funds? What are our ownership levels and how are those changing?

We run Monte Carlo simulations regularly to analyze the future capital requirements of companies, and whether we have reserved enough capital to support them in the out years. We look at the geographical distribution of our investments. We try to correlate all these data points to our investment thesis.

It's constant self-analysis, and it is part of how a VC fund should operate.

But I find it's also helpful to sometimes zoom in closely, almost microscopically, at the companies themselves. To forget about portfolio diversity (or even returns), or the ups and downs they go through, and remind myself of what it is they do at a discrete level, and why they use the Internet to do that.

So after our weekly meeting on Monday I poked around the USV portfolio a bit. I learned about:

* The 100+ pages of poetry on Wattpad, many with tens of thousands of reads and thousands of comments. This writer invents poetry forms too. People like poetry, apparently.

* The (more than) than 7,000 Etsy results for "magic wand" - there are some incredible, handmade, wands for sale there.

* The Black&Sexy network of videos and films and programming over on VHX - "programming focused on a young, progressive, Black audience who seek a truer reflection of their modern culture." This group makes short videos and sells them for between $2 and $5 and also gives them away for free on Youtube. They have sold tens of thousands of these Internet-only shows.

* I found this fundraiser on Crowdrise that supports an organization that teaches Filipino folk dance to Filipino-American youth in Stockton, CA. Micro-support ftw.

* This small fashion accessories company in London borrowed $100k from over 1,000 people via the lending platform on Funding Circle.

* A guy on Skillshare who uses his 100 year old family recipe to teach you how to brine.

* And, Liz from Seattle started a new career at age 55 after learning how to code for free on Codecademy.

These surely are not necessarily signs of ultimate start-up success (though I might argue they are directional indicators of such).

But it makes things more meaningful for me to dig a little deeper sometimes to see what is really going on. It keeps me optimistic, and optimism may be a core competency of a venture investor, after all.

Experience

2014-08-13T14:07:00.001-04:00

God, what a mess, on the ladder of success

Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung

- Paul Westerberg

I was in a board meeting the other day at a company we have been investors in for a bunch of years. It is run by a small, great group of people, who built a good social product that did reasonably well - many users - but never broke out and achieved those hyper growth rates associated with services that have network effects.

Until this spring, when the service caught fire, adding hundreds of thousands (or more) of users a week, tens of millions of sessions a day, top 20 status in app stores the world over. Many things they had been thinking about for years started to work. At this meeting, I listened to updates from a bunch of the team members including the founder and in areas such as systems, community, product and analytics. And as I listened to these people I knew well and had heard from many times over the past few years, it occurred to me they had changed. It was not that they had suddenly become successful - after all it's early days and this company will face many more ups and downs in its journey. It was that they have been through a transformative business experience. Rebuilding a product on almost no budget, making gut calls and decisions, managing a massive growing, international and vocal community. They were now presenting to us as experienced business people, confident in their plans and in command of their data and themselves.

They now had experience. And it is going to be fun to watch what they do with it.

As amazing as it was to see, it also humbled me. For how could I possibly advise and counsel them on the things they had experienced? I know nothing about operating a distributed moderation team in multiple languages. Nor little about building a redundant real time system handling millions of requests a day with almost zero latency and no down time.

I remember when I started to work at AOL in mid-1990s and on my second day there I was told to negotiate and document a relationship with AOL's then-largest marketing partner, American Express. I was given the old deal to refer to, and little else. Everyone else was too busy to guide me. I cried at home at night with what seemed to be an insurmountable task - I had never done this before. But we got it done - I don't recall we even got it done particularly well - but it was done. The next deal we did was better because by then I had at least a modicum of confidence, of experience. The next one even better. I imagine in some way it got me here, so I can bank on that journey as my way to add value.

I've always been a big believer in the concept of the "beginner's mind" - that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” But I'm not so sure that principle is always applicable. A little experience also goes a long way, which I re-learned this week.